


Madness

by prieta



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, prison fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-16
Updated: 2014-04-16
Packaged: 2018-01-19 16:14:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1475995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prieta/pseuds/prieta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Galatians 6:7//<br/>In the dark of his cell, Will plans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Madness

_Dark things creep in the shadows of the restless night, and I am one of them. Like a spider at her weaving loom with infinite patience I cast my net and bait my lures; before our story ends, he shall know what it means to know a loss so deep it feels like the severing of limbs. He shall know what fear tastes like. This is my design._

\--

Sometimes Will opens his eyes and she is there. Standing just within his field of vision, with her hair in her face and the mouth of her red jacket curling around her neck clean and crisp as the day she'd walked out of his cell to die. In the dark of night with the inmates tucked into their cells and the moon low on the sky she pads around his cell, neatly sidestepping puddles and stains as she wanders aimlessly between steel bars and cracked ceramic, throwing vague, rambling commentary his way like she were analyzing the crime scenes she loved.

She’d been dead for a week when she finally arrives; he was dragging himself out from some nightmare or the other and there she was, leaning over his ratty bed with her hair swinging like a curtain around his eyes. 

“Miss me,” she asks. She tips her head back in greeting so the ends of her hair brush his cheek cold and smooth, a feeling like he's still by the lakes of his youth with his hands immersed in the water letting the fish flit between his fingers, and she smiles her foxy grin and blows away the hot tears that slide from his cheek.

\--

Alana visits, Jack visits. Her self-righteous indignation and his self-pitying fury. He learns to drown it out; the crisp  _snap-snapping_ of her heels on the grimy sanitarium floor, his increasingly guarded invocations, listening instead to the sound of Beverly perched on his chair trying to make baskets into the cell next to them, her lazy cheers, the soft slide of her breath. Tuesday after Matthew is sent on his errand and Hannibal returns for another visit. He tips his hands in greeting and spreading his suit jacket behind him, ever the dinner party gentleman.

“All actions have consequences,” he reminds Will, preening, a smug twist to his lips. “We reap what we sow.” He runs his fingers through the lapels of his suit and all Will can see behind the vicious tempo at the back of his head is Beverly besides him dressed so pale in her dark coat with her blood slowly pooling around their feet. 

 _Consequences_ _,_ Will thinks. Sometimes he wakes up to her boots knocking against the bars and he forgets that she’s dead until she raises her hand in greeting and it passes though the walls. Sometimes when she appears he can still see on her chest the fine, hairline seams that Hannibal had split her apart at and knows with a deep incomprehensible terror that if he’d touch his hands to them she’d peel apart like a split apple.

At night like clockwork he wakes up heaving and sobbing and stares at his shaking hands until the lines of his palms writhe and morph and become long hanks of her glossy hair matted and dull with blood. Out of the corner of his eyes flits the sleek red leather of the jacket she died in, livid and red like an open maw, a gaping wound. Her black eyes gaze back at him, soft and pitying, her head held motionless by the antler tines wrapped like a lover’s hand around her neck.

 _Beverly_ , he wants to say, terrified and sick with it, rocks himself with shaking hands, gagging on the taste of bile at the back of his throat. _Beverly, Beverly._

\--

Behind his back Abel stirs restlessly, and Beverly is humming the opening of _MASH_ under her breath.

“Not a little worried,” she wonders aloud, tilting her head lazily, perched on his sink with one knee curled to her chest. Today she is wearing her lab coat with her regulation goggles pushed up past her forehead and her shirt creased at the elbows. “Seeing your dead girlfriend?”

Silence; the faint scuffle of rats between the boards, the clattering steps of the orderlies making their rounds. Abel coughs next to his ear, mutters something quietly. She considers him, solemnly the smile slipping from her mouth.

“Do you regret telling me,” she asks him. 

"I regret a lot of things," he says, voice hoarse with silence.  _Consequences_ , Hannibal reminds him. That careless, sated smile on his face as he reclined like a victor on the grungy metal chair they’d set outside his cell. He’d got up to leave and he’d walked right through Beverly, tracked her blood with him as he departed like some maddening treasure map. When Will closes his eyes he all he can see is her body, mounted and dissected, staring sightlessly at some distance far away.

“I miss you,” he tells her, voice cracking, but she’s already gone. Her image a blackening movie screen fading away and all that’s left is the emptiness of a great hollow thing and his slow, hitching breaths.

\--

Will remembers; she wasn’t a glossy opera beauty like Alana Bloom but she would quirk her lips up when she saw him and share her lunch with him because she knew he would always forget to eat, at night she’d bully her way into his hotel room and curl herself up around him until he felt like he could breathe. 

 One shitty Thursday two weeks into a case when he’d been feverish and half out of his mind with grief he’d walk into the forensic room and she had been standing at the centrifuge holding samples up to the ugly fluorescent lights, lashes dark against the grimy light, with her hair pulled away from her forehead and crease lines on her cheek from the goggles and the tenderness welling in his chest bled through him like a knife to the gut.

He’d wondered, then, if she would close her eyes and let him cover her eyes with his hand he would feel her lashes fluttering against his palm, ever so softly— Beverly, who never wore gloss or lipstick to work but who’d straighten her hair so it’d fall neat around her face and do up her eyes in long, curling lines like the tail ends of calligraphy strokes. Beverly, who faced down the world for him, who believed him when he didn’t believe himself.

Chilton doesn’t let him out to see the funeral. Alana comes the day before and lets him pick out a flower to place on the grave, and brings with her a little recording of the funeral procession. The tinny quality of her teal cellphone blasting squeaky violins and the constant squeal of white noise, Beverly’s tombstone a pale white blur, like an afterimage. He thinks, absurdly, of his grandmother. She would always said it wasn’t the girl who would go to the movies with you who you should keep, but the girl who would visit you in prison.

 _What about_ , he wonders, darkly, _the girl who’d break into a cannibal’s kitchen for you?_ He has to resist the urge to laugh—totally inappropriate. Beside Alana's chair Beverly leans in close, watching the procession on the screen with interest. Alana doesn't seem to notice, when she shifts restlessly her hair slides right through Beverly. In a few years she would become just another sick office joke; a lost crime scene investigator walks into a cannibal’s den asking for directions. An FBI agent and Hannibal the Cannibal walk into a dining room at midnight. Jack had told him they’d swapped out one of her kidneys for James Grey’s. Perhaps right this very minute Hannibal was sitting down to a meal of kidney—grilled with a side of aioli, poached in sherry, maybe baked into a pie, fine wine in his hands, classical music in the background, very classy, very elaborate. He wonders who else he had with him, who tasted Beverly's kidneys with shock and delight, complimented him on his masterful cooking, the crispness of the meat, the freshness.

“What are you planning, Will,” Alana asks. “You can’t keep pushing your guilt onto Hannibal.” Will doesn’t reply, and watches the way she visibly rails, so eager to rise up in defense of Hannibal the Saviour, Hannibal the Marytr. They didn’t see; no one saw, not even Beverly but she had been willing to pretend for him, and that got her a bullet between the second and third ribs and a trip to the butcher’s blade.

He looks at Beverly, staring back at him lips half twisted in that wry smile of hers and her hands tucked childishly into her stupid winter coat even though she’d never see another winter again. Thinks about the cottony smell of her perfume and her blood on Hannibal’s hands, the expression on her face as she sat staring at him from across the same table with death spread out between them, conflicted but still foolishly, stupidly willing to believe. 

He whispers hoarsely, supplicating, “I know. I’m sorry. It's just- I miss her so much.” Tightens his grip on his chains and tips his head forward, grimaces like a lover grieving should. Alana purses her lips, softening, ever the forgiver. He watches through the fringe of his hair as she reaches her hands out to grip his, and he closes his eyes, already considering his next words.

 _Consequences_ , he thinks.

\--

FIN

 

**Author's Note:**

> My emotions for the entire season 2 can be summed up as "why Beverly why".


End file.
